In his stern instruction booklet Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909), Ambrose Bierce condemned the use of because for for, as in “I knew it was night, because it was dark.” Why might he have done this?

For on in “a small iTunes info viewer for on the desktop” seems odd, but it is just a P (for) with a PP object (on the desktop) — an ordinary construction of English as in The cognac is for after dinner or I took the basket from under the desk.

The challenge of understanding The castle was visited by England’s King Edward I, also known as Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, and Oliver Cromwell comes from the necessary detangling of how the commas are used after King Edward I.

On two issues: ending a sentence with a preposition (i.e., stranding rather than fronting a preposition), and the construction where … at? The first is a total red herring; the second has been the subject of considerable usage advice.

When a linguist says that they love ambiguity more than most people, do they mean that they love ambiguity more than most people love ambiguity? They love ambiguity more than they love most people? Or both?

Common acronyms like MBA (Master in Business Administration) are made plural by adding an ending (e.g., MBAs) and sometimes with an apostrophe plus an ending (e.g., MBA’s). Is there a One Right Way to resolve this inconsistency in written plural forms?

On issues related to the Adj conversion, or the use of truncation to change adjectival modifiers into nouns by truncation, with the new noun with accepted as having (roughly) the meaning of the originalphrase(e.g., scrambled eggs —> scrambled, chorizo sausage —> chorizo).

Compounds are notorious for their ambiguity; clarity is the price you pay for the brevity of compounds. The compound infant-size (similarly, infant-sized) is ambiguous between ‘a size appropriate for use with/for/by an infant; very small’ and ‘the size of an infant’.

An NP reduced question serves ease of production, but it also literally provides less information than a full question, so divining a speaker’s intentions requires the hearer to use knowledge about the world and the context in which the question is uttered.

On “having no word for” some concept, including needing — or at least wanting — a word for it, the ambiguity of these invented verbs, the source of such ambiguities in marker-poor combinations of elements, and the motivation for such marker-poor combinations.